“Kathy Griffin is just waiting for me to die so she can have my career,” Rivers complained to her intimates.
Many of their peers saw Griffin as champing at the bit, and Fashion Police ultimately pushed her into overplaying her hand. When Rivers went into a coma after undergoing an endoscopy, Griffin allegedly began angling to replace her on Fashion Police before Rivers had even died.
“Two different people report that, while Joan was still comatose, another comedienne already pushed for her E-TV Fashion Police show,” the gossip columnist Cindy Adams wrote in the New York Post. “Nice, right? No business like show business. Replacements begin when a star coughs.”
In a subsequent column headlined “Fashion Police a Mess Without Joan Rivers,” Adams named names. “Kathy Griffin—talented, able—made a grab for the job while Joan lay on life support. I know. I was right there in her hospital room holding my forever friend’s hand…However, Griffin and an E! spokesperson have denied it. Nobody will confirm this, so don’t try,” Adams wrote.
Others subsequently claimed they did confirm the backstage maneuvering, including the writer Rich Juzwiak, who called Griffin’s tactics “jaw-droppingly opportunistic even by Hollywood standards” in a post on Defamer.com. “Kathy literally called E! the day after Joan went into a coma and said, ‘If she doesn’t make it, I’d like the job,’” Juzwiak’s source reported.
Griffin denied everything, telling Larry King that the rumor was “disgusting” and “not true.”
“I would never take Joan’s job. Joan and I had a different style,” Griffin maintained.
“Never” didn’t last long; before the year ended, Melissa Rivers, the executive producer of Fashion Police, announced that Griffin was joining the show, along with stylist Brad Goreski, who replaced longtime panelist George Kotsiopoulos.
The changes touched off another round of behind-the-scenes drama, with Defamer reporting that Griffin “had George fired because she didn’t want the gay guy that had been laughing at Joan’s jokes all these years sitting next to her,” according to Juzwiak’s source. “She wanted to bring her own guy in that would laugh at her jokes, and she knew Brad Goreski because they both had shows on Bravo.”
Griffin was also criticized for failing to work as hard as her predecessor. Juzwiak’s Defamer story quoted from another blog that noted, “While Rivers is said to have had about twenty jokes written and at the ready for every situation, Griffin apparently thought she could waltz in and ‘wing it’ and she simply BOMBED. (It’s not about being mean, it’s about being funny.)”
Fashion Police tried gamely to position the show as an ongoing homage to Joan, clearly figuring that was its best bet for survival. After Joan died, the program opened with guest panelists swearing a mock oath of allegiance with a hand on the so-called Book of Joan. Melissa, who assumed a regular on-camera role to anchor the show, continued to refer to its followers as “Joan Rangers.” A new segment was called “What Would Joan Say?”
But Griffin looked supremely uncomfortable in Joan’s chair, and the whole arrangement self-destructed after the show’s Academy Awards episode, in which Fashion Police cohost Giuliana Rancic said that Disney star Zendaya’s dreadlocks made her look as if she smelled like patchouli “or weed.” Cohost Kelly Osbourne accused Fashion Police of racism and left the show, followed by Griffin. Although they portrayed their departures as acts of principle, some reports claimed that they quit because they were about to be fired.
Griffin spun her exit as an act of feminist solidarity and enlisted Lena Dunham to help craft her farewell. “I do not want to use my comedy to contribute to a culture of unattainable perfectionism and intolerance towards difference,” Griffin said in a statement she posted on Twitter and Instagram. “I want to help women, gay kids, people of color, and anyone who feels underrepresented to have a voice and a LAUGH! That has been my platform for decades and my body of work speaks for itself…I discovered that my style does not fit with the creative direction of the show & now it’s time to move on.”
But the debacle left Melissa seething, and she finally went public with her opinion of Griffin’s behavior in an interview with Hoda Kotb at New York’s 92nd Street Y in the spring of 2015.
“My biggest complaint was the feeling that she kind of shit all over my mother’s legacy in her statement on leaving,” Melissa said. “And I know that was not the intentional reading of it, but that’s how I felt…by calling the comedy and the style of it old-fashioned. It was like, ‘I understand what you were doing, you’re trying to save yourself, but don’t crap all over my mother to do it.’”
Melissa also acknowledged that she had made a mistake in agreeing to Griffin as her mother’s successor. “It wasn’t a match, on a lot of levels,” she said.
After Joan’s unexpected death, the desperate scramble to continue the show had led to strategic miscalculations. “It was a very, very difficult time. I had a lot of conversations with everybody involved,” Melissa said. “It really shows that we were a family. We went back too fast, and when the matriarch died, the sisters started fighting.”
As the show’s executive producer, Melissa was torn between her filial grief and her professional responsibilities. “It was extremely frustrating, as I had to keep my eye on the franchise and the legacy of it and not get involved in the personal,” she said.
But for Melissa, it was all too personal. “I felt like Fashion Police was this little jewel, and it was the last piece I had of my mother and I working together. I felt like all these people were so out of control, including the one who made the allegations of racism. They took the last thing I had and smashed it. I felt like I was Humpty Dumpty and I was on my knees gluing it back together.”
The mess only served to remind all parties that Joan was unique and irreplaceable. “It never would have happened if she was alive,” Melissa said.
But Fashion Police continued its tradition of being resolutely unafraid to offend, taking up such pressing topics as “Is camel toe the new booty?” and “What is a ‘thighbrow’?” (Answer: “When a woman’s bush sticks out from her panties.”)
“‘Bitch,’ ‘ho,’ ‘gold digger’—this is really a tribute to my mother, and those are many of her favorite words,” said Melissa. (“Slut,” “whore,” and “stripper” were also mentioned.)
Since its audience was accustomed to an unpredictable array of eruptions from its star, the show recycled some of Joan’s more outrageous on-camera moments to bolster its entertainment value after her death. When the new season started in August of 2015, the first show featured a medley of clips, an inordinate number of which involved Joan rasping out the word “pussy.” In a dizzying montage, she also slut-shamed Rihanna, drunk-shamed Snooki, and talked about Betty White’s bowel movements.
Men didn’t escape unscathed. “This dress reminds me of so many of the men I’ve dated,” Joan said. “Just another six inches would have made it all better.”
She also didn’t hesitate to name names. “I have seen baggy brown wrinkly things. I have seen Bill Cosby’s balls,” she said.
Ever happy to flout the demands of political correctness, Rivers relished ethnic clichés, as in a discussion of Jennifer Lopez’s appearance. “This confirms my theory that Puerto Ricans are just rich Jewish Mexicans,” Rivers observed.
Throughout her career, Rivers always worked out new material at small clubs in New York and Los Angeles, many of which no longer exist. During the last five years of her life the incubation process occurred at the Laurie Beechman Theatre, a no-frills room in the basement of the West Bank Cafe, a restaurant on West 42nd Street where Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Sean Penn used to be regular patrons and Bruce Willis once worked as a bartender. The theater, which opened in 1983, was originally called the West Bank Cafe Downstairs Theater Bar before being renamed for Laurie Beechman, a Broadway singer, actor, and cabaret performer. Rivers’s comedic predecessors in that space included Lewis Black, who authored forty plays as the playwright in res
idence for fourteen years.
“The first night she performed here, she gets offstage and says, ‘This is the room I’ve been searching for my whole life. How’s the food? Let’s eat,’” said Steve Olsen, who owns the restaurant and theater. “After that, we’d have a shrimp cocktail waiting for her in the wings, and then she’d eat risotto balls and have a glass of wine.”
Rivers had scouted the theater as a potential place to work once before, but Olsen liked her much better the second time around. “She was a totally different person from the woman I had experienced briefly twenty years earlier,” he said. “She had gone through a complete metamorphosis. She was kind, benevolent, respectful, charitable, and so grateful this time. She used to thank me for having her.”
Rivers’s arrival at the Beechman coincided with the start of the last triumphant phase of her career. “That was the beginning of her final cycle,” Olsen said. “People go in and out of fashion.”
And Rivers was back in fashion. “She was with us sometimes six to eight nights a month,” said Kenny Bell, the theater’s director of programming and special events. “She was doing two a week, and Tuesday and Wednesday were her nights. One time she did a doubleheader for us, of two shows in a night.”
No matter how often she performed, audiences bought what she was selling. “There was never an empty seat,” said Shelly Schultz.
But Rivers wasn’t in it for the profits. “The deal was that she was doing it for charity,” said Olsen. “She didn’t make a dime here. She gave it all to God’s Love We Deliver and Seeing Eye guide dogs for the blind.”
Olsen was dazzled by her stagecraft. “She was awesome—unbelievable,” he said. “She and Robin Williams were similar; they would take a deep breath and then let it out nonstop for an hour and twenty minutes. Joan was unbelievably funny, and she hit the mark all the time. It was a phenomenal experience having her around. Everyone just loved her.”
He was equally stunned by her nerve. “She was an equal opportunity put-down artist, and there were times I’d listen to things she was saying and I just couldn’t believe she was saying it—but it was funny,” Olsen admitted. “She’d say, ‘I love celebrity adoptions when it’s a child from the Third World. He’s living in a 90,000-square-foot mansion with three pools, hot, medium, and cold, but they want their kid to know where he comes from. Throw him in the closet with a jar of flies and don’t close the door—that’s his roots.’ When I was in the hospital getting a kidney transplant, she sent me a card that said, ‘Get well soon. Your staff is robbing you blind. Love, Joan.’”
For more than thirty years, Rivers kept a paper record of all her jokes on thousands of index cards, which she stored in walls of filing cabinets. In the documentary Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, she showed the bank of card catalogs containing her jokes, which she refused to transfer to a computer; if it failed, she said, “you’re screwed.”
The archive helped Rivers to vary her content in any way she wanted, a process of selection that she always approached as if she were a novice facing her first time onstage instead of a veteran. “I prepare like a crazy lady,” she said.
“She had so much material she could flip-flop any way she wanted, but she always had current humor,” said Kenny Bell. “She didn’t do politics, but she touched every headline. She made jokes about every single thing. There’s no person on this earth who was safe. No matter who they were, they were targets.”
Before she performed, Rivers taped cue cards on the stage to remind her of jokes she might otherwise forget. “The cue cards were taped all over the floor, handwritten in Magic Marker in big letters on white poster board,” said fashion consultant Jeffrey Mahshie, who saw her perform many times over the years. “Some things remained uncannily the same. There was always a section of those older jokes, because that was her comfort zone. She would still do Helen Keller jokes—but there were Kim Kardashian jokes peppered in there. She did add, but she did not throw away.”
Sometimes the results struck younger audiences as baffling. “She did an appearance in Dallas when I was at the Dallas Morning News, and it was like she grabbed the wrong set of index cards,” said Jason Sheeler. “She started doing jokes about Amy Carter being ugly. The audience was all a bunch of gay men, and we’re looking at each other and saying, ‘Did she just do an Amy Carter bit from 1976? It’s 2008, and you still think it’s fair to call a kid ugly from 1976—the daughter of a president, who never asked to be in public or on television?’ It was low-rent drag queen humor—it was just like, ‘I’m going to call you ugly!’ That’s where she would always lose me, because it just wasn’t funny and it wasn’t smart. It was bizarre. It was weird.”
In writing Rivers’s books, her coauthors faced a similar struggle to keep her humor from seeming too dated. “I would try to liven it up with younger celebrities and make it more modern, but she would always go with the Cher joke and fall back on Barbara Walters,” said Valerie Frankel, who coauthored Men Are Stupid.
Whatever the vintage of Rivers’s jokes, she always seemed to win over her audience in the end. “She was hysterically funny,” Mahshie said. “This is someone who made my jaw hurt because I laughed so much.”
And Rivers enjoyed the hilarity as much as her audience did. “No one in the place laughs more than Joan,” said Jason Sheeler. “She was always laughing the hardest. There were some times when she would get to the joke and she could barely get it out, like a kid who can’t wait to tell you a story. She said, ‘How does Michael J. Fox walk during an earthquake?’ Then she walks straight across the room—and she just doubled over.”
Because they understood what it took to deliver such an act, industry insiders were even more impressed by Rivers’s capacity to sustain her rapid-fire pace onstage. “It was a billion one-liners strung together, and that’s the toughest kind of act to do,” said Mark Simone. “To remember four hundred disjointed one-liners, rather than do a monologue—there are only a handful of people who could pull that off. I actually thought she was getting better in her later years. She wanted to get better, tighter, faster. I think she wanted to see how good she could get.”
No matter how often Rivers performed at the Beechman, her show continued to be a powerful attraction. “It was never advertised, but it was always sold out,” Bell said. “The audience was so varied. It was old and young, gay and straight, housewives from Long Island and people from all over the world. Her audience was people from their late twenties on into their sixties, but toward the end the millennials started coming in because they knew her from Fashion Police.”
Rivers had a simple explanation for why she still went to the trouble of playing small clubs. “She said, ‘I think of something funny, and I write the joke. I deliver the joke, and I either fall on my ass or they laugh. And that’s better than staying home and watching television,’” Olsen reported. “She couldn’t get enough of it.”
Chapter Twenty
Daughter Dearest:
How to Succeed in Show Business
Even as a little girl, Melissa Rivers—whose original name was Melissa Rosenberg—never got the chance to be an ordinary kid. Growing up with Joan was like being sent to showbiz boot camp, and the lessons started early.
As conceptualized by Joan, the curriculum seemed designed to cultivate a precocious cynicism rather than to preserve any childlike innocence.
Some parents strive to help their children discover their own unique inner voice, and they pursue that goal by encouraging their offspring to pay attention to what they feel instead of worrying about what the rest of the world thinks. But for the child of Joan Rivers, the training in how to deal with life was guided by a cold-blooded focus on manipulating public perceptions. The ultimate goal was to create a favorable image, no matter how fraudulent it might be.
The fundamental nature of that approach was encapsulated in an anecdote that Joan’s longtime manager Billy Sammeth told Kevin Sessums in their Daily Beast interview.
“I once took Joan and Meliss
a to the Palm Court at the Plaza when Melissa was around seven or eight years old,” Sammeth said. “Two old Jews came up to Joan that day. They said something to Joan in Yiddish. Melissa was roaming around the room like a little Jewish Eloise, and Joan calls her over. Melissa traipses over and Joan told the old Jew to repeat what he had just said in Yiddish, and Joan and Melissa fell all over each other hysterically laughing. My eyes were falling out of my head thinking how smart this little girl is to already know Yiddish. So after the old Jews walked away and Melissa goes off to pretend she’s Eloise, I turn to Joan and say, ‘My word, Joan. I’m so impressed. Melissa knows Yiddish?’ Joan goes, ‘No. She doesn’t know Yiddish and I don’t know Yiddish. But anybody who’s speaking to you in Yiddish is telling you a joke, so you laugh at the end of it. I’ve taught her that much so nobody will think she’s stupid.’ That was Joan in her fifties. She’s almost eighty now and she still treats her daughter the same way.”
But it wasn’t enough to mold Melissa’s behavior; Joan also started early in trying to remake Melissa physically, as she had done with herself. “She made her have her nose done,” said Sue Cameron. “She wanted Melissa to be pretty, and by Joan’s standards, she was also getting Melissa ready for a man.”
Despite her parents’ obsession with show business, Melissa was their top priority throughout her childhood. “Melissa was the focus of everything,” said Dorothy Melvin. “Joan’s career was the most important thing, but family and Melissa would never suffer because of The Career. Melissa was Daddy’s girl, his little pride and joy, and with Edgar, she could do no wrong. He was crazy about her, and she was crazy about him. It was a happy household.”
But it was far from an ordinary one. “When Melissa turned thirteen, she didn’t want a religious ceremony, so they gave her a very formal lunch at L’Orangerie, where the first course was eggs in eggshells with caviar, followed by poached salmon with pureed sorrel sauce and cucumbers,” said Cameron. “When Joan got up to give the toast, she said to two hundred people, ‘I guess this is the right moment to tell you, Edgar—Melissa isn’t yours.’ People were screaming with laughter.”
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